SAN DIEGO — I would have given up on Kathi Hardy. You probably would have too.

At the lowest point in a life of lows, Hardy had been arrested 14 times for prostitution. Addictions — to heroin, cocaine and alcohol — had ravaged her body. The drugs also wrecked her judgment. She continued to work the streets despite having been raped repeatedly and surviving an encounter with a serial killer who targeted prostitutes.

And she was starting to close in on 40 years of age.

People that far gone don't change. But Kathi Hardy did.

"The 15th time I was arrested, I was told I was going to lose my son. And I couldn't lose my son," Hardy says over French toast and coffee at an IHOP. "On the 15th time, I went to my first AA meeting. The police harassed me enough to save my life."

Of the many inspirational people I met while reporting on the EXPLOITED project, no one inspired me more than Hardy — not only because of where she came from, but more so because of where she's gone in the 25 years after that 15th arrest.

“If you’re asking a woman or a girl to do something you can’t ask your wife or girlfriend to do, you might want to take a look at what you’re asking.”
Mykal McEldowney/IndyStar

Today, Hardy has assisted nearly 400 victims of child trafficking who were held in juvenile detention in San Diego County. She leads a support group for transgender victims of sex trafficking (who are especially vulnerable to physical abuse). She runs an intervention program for those arrested for prostitution for the first time in San Diego County (more than half are victims of human trafficking). She also helps to educate sex buyers at a local johns school about the ugly realities of the trade.

She does it all with a relentless passion rooted in the depths of her own suffering.

"I worked with two girls in the detention center who were raped, then trafficked when they were 9 years old," Hardy says with tears on her face. "By the time I saw them when they were 14, they already had five years in the life. It rips my heart out. I want those young ladies to know of their potential beyond that. God didn't put them on this earth for that."

We tell ourselves that every life is precious. That no one is beyond hope. They're nice sentiments. But how often do we write off people like Kathi Hardy as lost souls beyond reach?

It happens all the time to human trafficking survivors. Because their stories aren't simple. Their paths to recovery aren't easy. Their pain and anger aren't pretty.

“These are not Barbies on a shelf,” Tracy McDaniel, a social worker who assists trafficking victims in Indiana, said. “These girls have real issues. They’ve been sexually molested; they’ve been abused repeatedly. These kids need complex trauma treatment.”

People often ask: What can I do to help stop human trafficking? By that they mean, what organization should I give money to? Where should I volunteer? What legislation should I tell my representatives to pass?

Those are all good, necessary things.

Chris Lenty is founder of the MST (Men in the Sex Trade) Project, which operates in the sprawling red light district of Nana Plaza in Bangkok, Thailand. Lenty and his team try to forge friendships with the men who frequent Nana Plaza's bars and sex clubs in hopes of helping them to understand the damage they're doing to others and to themselves.(Photo: Tim Swarens/IndyStar)

But allow me to challenge you to go even deeper. Don't give up on the millions of people like Kathi Hardy who've suffered exploitation. The Kathi Hardy who was still on the streets after 14 arrests. The Kathi Hardy who needed four decades to begin to heal. Because as much as we think we know about how their stories will end, we don't know. Sometimes people do change.

A month after meeting Hardy, I was on the other side of the planet when Chris Lenty stopped me with a question: What do you think about these men?

Lenty referred specifically to the men who come from around the world to purchase sex in Nana Plaza, the sprawling red light district in the heart of Bangkok. But he could have been talking about sex buyers in general.

By that time, I had interviewed dozens of survivors and therapists who had described horrific abuse inflicted by traffickers and buyers. I also had interviewed sex buyers who had voiced cruel indifference about the harm they caused.

The truth is I felt mainly anger and disgust toward the buyers. But the lesson of Kathi Hardy was still in my mind, and if no person is beyond hope, doesn't that include the exploiter as well as the exploited?

That question is at the heart of Lenty's work as founder of the MST (Men in the Sex Trade) Project. He and his team try to forge friendships with the men who frequent Nana Plaza's bars and sex clubs in hopes of helping them to understand the damage they're doing to others and to themselves.

The goal isn't merely to drive changes in behavior but also to help the men find relief from the compulsions that drive them to buy sex with strangers. (The MST Project's mission doesn't include working with the relatively small percentage of sex buyers who are pedophiles).

Lenty had a point to the question he'd posed: "I've found that condemning someone doesn't help motivate them to change."

And motivating change rather than hurling condemnation needs to be the primary approach to buyers if the scourge of sex trafficking is to be stopped. That's not about letting buyers off the hook for their actions. Legal and social accountability is important.

CLOSE

Spending a year investigating the terrible world of child sex trafficking could have made columnist Tim Swarens despair. But there is still so much hope.
Mykal McEldowney/IndyStar

But if we're going to coax men who sexually exploit others out of the shadows and into counseling and other forms of personal accountability, then we need to see them as people with value. People who can change.

Two months after leaving Bangkok, my stomach started to churn as I walked into a Starbucks a few hours from my home and spotted the child I was there to meet.

At a table with her therapist, the girl looked so young, so vulnerable. And this was two years after more than 100 men had paid to have sex with a then high school freshman.

"It sucked. It was a low point in my life, one of the lowest, " she said about the exploitation. "But all of that has got me to where I am now.”

The buyers paid to exploit a child who already had been abused and abandoned. She was confused, angry and afraid. But she was not defeated.

Now back at home and back in school, she's on the path to college. After two years of intense therapy, she's getting stronger by the day. “I’m at a good point in my life right now," she said.

Once lost in the depths of exploitation, she didn't give up. She kept fighting.